Propagation of Solar Energetic Particles in the Outer Heliosphere: Interplay between Scattering and Adiabatic Focusing

Abstract

The turbulence and spatial nonuniformity of the guide magnetic field cause two competitive effects, namely, the scattering effect and the adiabatic focusing effect, respectively. In this work, we numerically solve the five-dimensional Fokker–Planck transport equation to investigate the radial evolutions of these important effects undergone by the solar energetic particles (SEPs) propagating through interplanetary space. We analyze the interplay process between the scattering and adiabatic focusing effects in the context of three-dimensional propagation, with special attention to the scenario of the outer heliosphere, in which some peculiar SEP phenomena are found and explained. We also discuss the radial dependence of the SEP peak intensities from the inner through the outer heliosphere, and conclude that it cannot be simply described by a single functional form such as R ^−α (R is radial distance), which is often used.